Daddy, I hated you! TV's smoothest star Michael Aspel reveals his loathing for his own father

Michael Aspel is one of TV's smoothest stars. But in this startlingly frank interview, he reveals his loathing for his own father... and asks if his troubled childhood could be to blame for the breakdown of his three marriages.

Michael Aspel looked in the mirror the other day and saw his father staring back. His reaction wasn't a happy one, and not just because it was a reminder of advancing years. 'There is something disconcerting about seeing someone you often didn't care much for, looking back at you,' he says.

'I've been noticing it more and more recently. I see him in me, physically, and I really don't like it.'

While he cringes at the facial resemblance, there is a deeper issue at work here. In fact, the way he talks about him, it seems that at one stage of his life, at least, Aspel Snr inspired only animosity.

It's quite odd to hear the normally avuncular presenter speak about anyone in such tones. Would he say he actually hated him, once?

'Yes, I think I would,' he concludes, quite matter-of-factly. 'That would be a pretty good summing up of the situation. I remember my sister, Pat, once saying to me: "Michael, you are very hard on him."

'I replied: "Well, you were not in my shoes. You had a very different relationship with him."

'My memories of my father, certainly from my teenage years, were terrible ones. He was an incredibly introspective man then, to such a degree that it made him almost catatonic. You couldn't talk to him. You certainly couldn't share anything with him - dreams, aspirations. Basically, he was not interested in us.

'He had a problem with authority, and this obsession with being working class. If we tried to read Shakespeare or go to the cinema, he would get angry. He saw anything vaguely artistic as a betrayal of the working classes.'

It may seem strange, when Aspel is 75 and his father long dead, that he is pondering his feelings towards him now.

But Aspel has recently finished filming a documentary series which has stirred up all manner of memories.

Evacuees Reunited involved taking some of those who were evacuated during World War II back to their foster homes.

Aspel, asked to present and to contribute with his own experiences, was delighted to be involved.

After all, he had spent nearly five years in Chard, Somerset, after being packed on a train, aged just seven, with a label tied to his clothes - 'like a parcel'.

Like so many of his generation (a staggering 3.5 million British children were evacuated to the countryside, away from the threat of German bombs), the young Michael spent what many would regard as the formative years of his life with strangers, many miles from his home in Wandsworth, London.

It made the project deeply personal, but not even Aspel could have predicted the impact reopening that chapter of his life would have.

'The thing is, it underlined how much I had been one of the lucky ones,' he says. 'Some evacuees had the most dreadful experiences - abused, uncared for, treated in ways that seem horrific today.

'I didn't - much of it was quite wonderful - but it was still a huge deal. Any child going through that today would be offered counselling, at the very least.

'I think what being involved in the programme did was help me put my own experience in context, remembering the happy times as well as confronting the not-so-happy ones. I still don't have all the answers, though.'

Some of the programme is gloriously sepia-tinted. There is much hilarity as Aspel meets up with some of his old friends from those days - fellow evacuees - and reminisces about befriending the GIs.

Now that the cameras have stopped rolling, however, he is left pondering how much that chapter in his life shaped the rest of it.

For starters, would he have had a happier relationship with his father, a newsagent by trade, had the war not intervened?

'That I will never know. What I can say is that I don't recall any problems before it. We were just a normal family before the war. I do remember my father playing with us, us shrieking with laughter as he rubbed his stubbly chin against ours.

'I remember big happy Christmases when the whole family came to us. I remember all of us sitting, as a family, listening to the radio and reading. There was a warm atmosphere there. We were loved, no doubt about it.

'It was after the war, when I went home, that the problems started. Perhaps it was inevitable. My father had been off fighting and had obviously seen terrible things. He had become used to living in a certain way.

'Suddenly, he was faced with having to deal with these children that he simply didn't recognise.

'I wasn't just five years older, but remarkably self-sufficient. The people in Somerset had pretty much let me run wild. I was, I'm ashamed to say, something of a tearaway.

'My father's way of dealing with us was to try to run the house on military lines; barking orders. But it didn't work. The more difficult it became, the more frustrated he'd get. It certainly wasn't any dream homecoming.'

Michael Aspel with son Daniel and former wife Lizzie Power in 1985: 'With me, it was never the children who were the problem'

Family life, in fact, was fraught, often violent, with Aspel and his father frequently squaring up to each other. Punches were sometimes traded. When he was 18, Aspel remembers telling his father: 'I'm more of a man than you will ever be.'

'It became patently obvious that my father wasn't suited to family life,' says Michael. 'He felt hemmed in, trapped. Mother tried to hold it all together, but she kind of cracked, too. At one point she started to lose her hair - it just fell out.'

It was certainly not the happy ending the young Aspel had so longed for. And what peeves him most is the fact that his father railed against everything Michael had taken comfort from during his years in effective exile.

'The thing I looked forward to most was going to the cinema,' he recalls. 'I remember sitting on the steps of the picture house from 9am waiting for Gone With The Wind to open. It didn't start until 2pm. And I could never get enough of cowboy films.

'I grew up wanting to be an actor. Father never could have understood that.'

Many people may not be aware of the fact that Aspel Jnr did, in fact, start out as an actor. At heart, it seems, he still thinks of himself as a failed one.

He has always said that it was only by chance that he became a presenter - first persuaded to put that remarkable velvety voice to good use by reading the news, then slipping into the world of light entertainment.

He became a household name, hosting everything from the Miss World contests to This is Your Life. He would go on to become one of the most iconic figures in British broadcasting, up there with Wogan and Parkinson.

Not that Aspel ever put himself in that league. In the past, he has dismissed great swathes of his career as 'inconsequential, bland and useless', and he stands by that today.

When I ask what he is proudest of, he quibbles with the word. 'Proud isn't a word I'd ever use,' he says. 'I suppose reading the news was the most important thing I ever did. But proud? I'm not sure of that.'

In fact, there is plenty to be proud of. With Aspel and Co, he secured an extraordinarily rare non-political interview with the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, which should surely be a contender.

Michael and his father had established some kind of truce before the old man died, at the age of 87.

Michael Aspel wipes away a tear on his final edition of Antiques Roadshow

'He was a wonderful grandfather, actually,' says Michael. 'By the time he died, I'd come to pity him, understand him even. I came to realise that he'd had a terrible childhood himself. But he was never the sort of man I wanted to be.'

And therein lies some of his anguish. Whether he likes it or not - and he doesn't - there are parallels with the way Aspel's private life has panned out.

He may not have had a war to contend with, but there has been immense difficulty. He has lost two of his seven children, one son, James, at three days old, another, Gregory, at 30, to cancer. Another son, Patrick, has cerebral palsy.

A contented domestic life never happened for him either. He has been married three times, and walked out on each marriage. In the past he has admitted to feeling 'hemmed in' and 'trapped' - just as his father had done.

In 1994, his private life was laid bare in tabloid headlines when he left actress Lizzie Power, after 16 years together, to move in with Irene Clarke, a production assistant on This Is Your Life, with whom he still lives.

He doesn't want to talk at length about all this, on the grounds that 'there are too many people to hurt', but admits that he spent much of his adult life lacking any ability to commit.

'Does the restlessness I have felt as an adult have anything to do with my childhood?' he asks, when I raise the subject.

'Perhaps, but I'm wary of going down that road. I always feel reluctant to make any excuses for myself. I don't want to hide behind anything. You have to take responsibility for your own life, for the things you have mucked up.'

What he does seem grateful for, though, is that he never took his own frustrations out on his children, as his father clearly did.

'With me, it was never the children who were the problem, and my relationship with them was never affected by it. I'm grateful for that.'

Is he a better father than his own ever was? 'I would really like to think so,' he concludes. 'But it's only my children who can answer that.'

When he casts his mind back to his own childhood, Aspel is the one who points out how easily memories can be distorted.

He tells me that he remembers being the last child from his train-load of evacuees to be 'picked' - but concedes that this was probably not the case.

Despite believing he 'failed' as an actor, Michael Aspel has led a wonderful television career presenting household favourite shows such as This Is Your Life (above with singer Errol Brown)

'I was speaking to the man who runs the Evacuees Association, and he said: "Everyone remembers that they were the last one picked." '

He is still surprised, though, at how vivid some of his recollections of those days are. 'I can't remember what happened last Wednesday, but certain things - like the clock ticking in the front room of my new "home" - are as clear as day.'

Ditto the train journey to Somerset. 'We knew the minute that we stepped on the train that something was different,' he says. 'There had been plenty of evacuation practice runs, where we would march up and down the street with our gas masks, the teachers beside us. It was fun, exciting. Of course we had no clue what it meant.'

Then, one day, he, his nine-year-old sister, Pat, and brother Alan, four, were buttoned into their coats and each handed a suitcase.

'My mother didn't come. There was no big goodbye, just a lot of children being led to the station, Pied Piper style, and put onto a train. It was stuffy. Mostly I just remember taking Alan to the loo because he had messed his trousers.'

When they reached Chard, the children - several hundred of them, he reckons - were herded into a community centre.

'People came along and just picked what children they wanted. Most wanted boys, to work in the fields. No one actually came for me. I don't know why.

'I was separated from my sister and brother, which I wasn't expecting. They went to a big house - I always remembered it as a mansion, but when I went back this time, I realised it was nothing of the sort. There wasn't enough room for me there, so I went to a small cottage.'

His new foster mother, whom he still calls Auntie Rose, wasn't even in when he arrived.

'She was only out in the garden, but I didn't realise that. I was put in the front room. I can still remember the heavy furniture, see the pictures, that clock. I thought I'd been there for an eternity, but it was probably only 15 minutes.

'When she came in, I must have sounded like something out of Dickens: "Please, Mam, I'm the new evacuee."'

He recalls a pretty miserable first night. 'I remember thinking, "I want my Mum". Auntie Rose handled the situation pretty well, though. She gave me a toy gun, which had been her son's.

'The next morning, I woke when she kissed me. Maybe she was thinking of her own son, who was 19 and away fighting in the war. Whatever, I don't think she ever knew that I was aware of that kiss. It was the first and only time there was any physical contact.'

He doesn't want to make it sound hideous, because it wasn't. He visited Rose and Cyril Grabham several times after the war, and they were always delighted to see him.

'They were kind people, incredibly good to me. I ate well - I remember Auntie Rose skinning rabbits, making huge stews - much better than anything my mother ever did. But it wasn't home.'

There were, he recalls, inevitable clashes between local kids and the evacuees - 'vaccies, they called us'.

'The local kids hated us, of course. I got off lightly. In fact, I was the one steaming in there, fists flying, but some kids were bullied dreadfully.

'That - coupled with the fact that they let me pretty much roam free - made me incredibly self-reliant. Quite tough for my age, I suppose.

'Today, of course, it would be considered barbaric; but we just accepted it, as did our parents in sending us away. They thought they were doing the right thing.'

Perhaps it is impossible to fully understand the history that has shaped us, but Aspel seems grateful that he has tried. He is quite a melancholy man, which perhaps isn't surprising given how turbulent his off-camera life has been.

He confesses that he misses the Antiques Roadshow, which he quit last year, handing over the reins to Fiona Bruce.

('People say she is too sexy for the show, and knows nothing about antiques. They said the same thing about me in my day - and they were right,' he quips.)

He does admit, however, that this programme on evacuees has given him more personal satisfaction than almost anything else in his 60-odd year career.

Perhaps it's because he never felt like a fraud doing it.

'Mostly, when you're in my line of work, you aren't that familiar with a subject: you are just the mouthpiece. This was different, though. I knew it because I'd lived it. There's a certain satisfaction there.

'And it did lay some demons to rest - for others, and for me. It was an extraordinary chapter in my life, and in the entire country's. We shouldn't forget it.'